ABSTRACT
The central task of economic history is to explain transitions from extensive growth to intensive growth. All else is commentary. The small number of spontaneous examples of intensive growth implies that transition was a surpassingly difficult matter. Yet all parts of the bridge were not equally hard to build. Although history is niggardly with clues as to which were the hardest parts, the prelude of extensive growth suggests that achieving a sustained rise in average per capita GNP ought not to have been preternaturally formidable. In the premodern world there was technical change and what might be called “investment creep.” The need was not to crank up completely cold economies but to pass already warm ones, in which total output and income were expanding, through the phase transition to the point where average income per head was growing. The normal explanations, embodied in Industrial Revolution studies, are inclined to talk as though the achievement burst on an economically stagnant world. They tend to be couched in terms of novel push-forces. Here the aim will be to look for a different type of explanation.
